INSIGHTS

​Dramatically improve the odds of your venture’s success by rooting out and mitigating knowable risks with a premortem.

In startup culture, optimism tends to flourish at the expense of honest pessimism. At Foundational, we embrace this by starting our strategy engagements collaborating with our clients to agree on how the world must be changing, what their teams are doing to bring about that change, and how we will measure the achievement of their inevitable success… we also use a novel process that quickly identifies the likely causes of failure well before they occur. It’s a simple and impactful technique that any team can do for themselves in under an hour.

Foundational has found that most healthcare technology startups’ greatest business challenges are fundamentally related to building trust with their end-users. While all startups face the challenge of trust, the healthcare space most clearly illustrates the need to interweave it throughout a product’s value proposition and core values. We’ve seen the impact of fine-tuning these two specific areas improve first-time user onboarding completion by as much as 300%.

How to eliminate the #1 killer of startups

I recently I wrote about the Product Management Gap: the period of time between having a successful demonstration of a technical innovation (the proof-of-concept) and when a full-time team member is assigned to focus on managing the product(s) that feature it.

The Product Management Gap is a pervasive and deadly problem in the VC-backed startup space that I feel accounts for over half of the ventures that succumb to the dreaded Series A Crunch. Although it’s easy to identify, and affects nearly every startup, the Gap is also stubbornly difficult to fix without access to the talent, and budget growth-stage companies have at their disposal to hire qualified Product Managers

​The #1 cause of death for startups is a self-inflicted wound

The Product Management Gap is the period of time between having a successful demonstration of a technical innovation (the proof-of-concept) and when a full-time team member is assigned to focus on managing the product(s) that feature it.​Early-stage funded startups commonly have employees focused on engineering, design, marketing and sales, but rarely do they have a team member dedicated to the one thing they need to get right to raise additional capital: product-market fit.

How rising VC expectations are causing founders to ignore user experiences in favor of unsustainable growth.

The trouble with innovation…

Through my experience as a repeat technical startup founder, I’ve found the greatest difficulty in developing a new technology is not getting something to function. It’s discovering that a user’s tolerance for learning a new workflow is frustratingly low. People are seeing something that’s different, but they are experiencing it through the lens of expectations they’ve been refining over their entire lives… expectations anchored by existing solutions that are measurably worse than the shiny new one.

There is some amount of friction inherent to the adoption of any innovation. A company must immediately convey the value of what they’ve spent months, or years, building. In the world of software, there’s a very brief window of time when a potential user can be convinced that a product meets their need. If a user is not aware of their need at this point in time, then the company faces the additional challenge of educating a consumer. Good Luck!

In no other context is this friction as essential to overcome quickly as in that of a startup. Startups are organizations with a lit fuse. Financial backers have given them a chance to test a new idea. They are operating at a loss, and will go out of business unless they raise additional capital in the near future… and that’s with a dedicated team working long hours at below-market salaries. Investors, employees, and even the founders assume this risk because they believe that their efforts will eventually be rewarded by a lucrative market segment in dire need of their offering.

Why so many startups fail so early.

​Everybody knows most startups fail, but what’s surprising is that 70% of seed-funded companies do not survive long enough to raise a subsequent round. In the venture community, this trend is better known as the Series A Crunch, and I believe it’s a consequence of rushing to market without having established sufficient product desirability — or, in Venture Capitalist parlance, traction.

70% of seed-funded startups fail to raise their next round (Source: Mattermark)

I love the way you guys have worked with me. The interest you have taken in my business, the detailed research you have done to help me create my narrative has been invaluable. I highly recommend Foundational!" - Founder, Ride Sharing App